No, IT'S much more, why its the DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND, an evil COMMUNIST PLOT to brainwash honest hard working ordinary innocent Americans into believing that contrary to mom, baseball and apple pie and in DIRECT OPPOSITION to the GOOD BOOK why its a TOOL of SATAN HIMSELF to bring down the good old red white and blue and turn us all into a bunch of alien ROBOTS who will buy foreign made cars and work on SUNDAYS well I'm going to keep making babies and watching the Country Music Channel inspite of this BOARD of INIQUITY!!!! duuuuuhhhhh, what where we talking about?
If this thread were an actual conversation the global mean temperature would have increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit. HOT AIR
Sigh. Every winter we get some simpleton who claims that because he has to wear a coat, climate change is baloney... and it's always conveyed in a smug, superior way, almost as if they are proud of their ignorance and daring you to point it out. Well, the good news is that in a month these people will no longer be running out government.
I believe in variance and seasonal cycles, and that other planets besides ours are warming as well. Enjoy your snow though.
The global banks and corporations won't be running our country on Jan. 20? You're right, that is great news!
If the ice caps melt, it could turn the arctic into a tropical climate. Not because it's hotter, but rather the surface is absorbing heat rather than reflecting it. Lots of interesting changes could happen if we get to that point.
Considering I live in Minnesota I have more of it than I care for. Although it did get up to 40 here yesterday so that cancels out your snow in Houston as an argument against Global Warming.
Obama made a number of energy appointments today. While the role of capitalism in politics will certainly still be felt, for those of us on the Global Warming is a Real Threat side of the table, this is some good news: Appointments
(1) Me too. As do all real climate scientists. As luck would have it, those concepts are not incompatible with the chemistry and physics of greenhouse gases. It's not an either/or proposition. (2) lol. Yes, somewhere, some planets are warming. And some are cooling. If you're joking with the snow stuff, great. But if you're serious about a cold spell disproving the mass of data on warming, let me ask you this: if you saw one good 10-minute run for the Dow Jones on Tuesday August 12, 2008, would you have been wise to put all your money into the market, thinking that the one good thirty minute run was an important indicator of the long term? Maybe I could interest you in some investment opportunities!
Actually B-Bob this exactly has been my issue with some climate reports that i've read. They are making determinations about a climate with millions of years of history based on something thats occured in the last 100 years. If thats the case then a 10-minute run on the DJIA would have as much if not more statistical relevance from a sampling standpoint as 100 years of our climate. Comments?
Hi FD. My comment is that I would agree, to an extent, if we were only talking 100 years of data. The oxygen isotope data (e.g. ice cores), which I happen to think are legit, are giving us about 400,000 years of data. See that vertical red line at the very end of the graph? It's a little weird. But yes, you can clearly see a cycle of about 100,000 years, and we're in the thick of that. What's MORE important about that graph is the amazing correlation of CO2 and temperature. (EDIT: note the last time we had CO2 at 300 ppm was the warmest time on record, about 3 C above what we are calling "normal." Now we've elevated CO2 to about 370 ppm...) When you combine that odd vertical red line at the end with truly understanding the fundamental science of what a molecule like CO2 does in the atmosphere (i.e. it will contribute warming, and we can just argue extent), it seems to me that behavior change is smart. But if you want to argue "there's a 700,000 year cycle that you eggheads will never understand and CO2 might be our savior from a major ice age," there is always a non-zero chance of that, as far as I can tell. But we can play a probability game, with some degree of certainty, and there's only a 5% chance at this point that the observed warming is completely "natural." I have to undercut my own stock market analogy by saying the climate is not ruled by psychology. But in any case, there is a real problem with sample size, no matter how you slice it.
Vostok ice core data might support this theory (sort of). Typical (brief) warm periods between ice ages are ~6000 yrs. It has been 12,000 years since the last ice age, a weird deviation hypothesized to be the result of the advent of human civilization and the corresponding burning of large swaths of forest. (Ruddiman, 2003) EDIT: Found a great link explaining the idea
